But what does being a Japanese writer really mean in a globalizing world? Mizumura’s career has been focused on exploring that question in formally inventive ways that often incorporate her own cross-cultural autobiography. In the process, she has managed to transcend the specifics of her own personal story, creating a body of work with incisive things to say to readers everywhere about the individual’s relationship to language, culture, and history.
Ecologists have long known that predators play a key role in ecosystems, shaping whole communities with the knock-on effects of who eats whom. But a new approach is revealing that it’s not just getting eaten, but also the fear of getting eaten, that shapes everything from individual brains and behaviour to whole ecosystems. This new field, exploring the non-consumptive effects of predators, is known as fear ecology.
The giant stone heads of Easter Island were to me, as a child in Australia, less a puzzle than a fable. This was a Brother’s Grimm island of eco-cannibals—they devoured their trees, then each other—a tale almost too absurd to be cautionary. How could real people not notice their surroundings becoming uninhabitable to all but statues? The cartoon version would end with an impassive head turning and winking a great obsidian eye.
Contemporary archaeologists dispute this popular version of Easter Island’s catastrophe, but these days the fable feels eerily plausible. After all, the basic plot of natural disaster and human myopia keeps repeating. It was a tale heard earlier this year, over what we’ve named Australia’s Black Summer. A tale being retold right now in California.
The Beguiling challenges perceptive readers to read between the lines, to let go of conventional ideas of a story with its beginning, middle, and end. Gartner’s writing, frenetic and unyielding, simply dazzles in this novel, as do her efforts to portray the tragic struggle of a fraught figure—the mother who can’t or won’t love—with frankness and humanity.
A deeply rooted intellectual prejudice holds that nothing much happened in the 1,000-odd years between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the rediscovery, in the 15th century, of the texts of the ancient world. Mr Falk sets out to discredit it.
The cat found us in our sleeping bags.
Little girl beside me sucking her thumb.